PlanGuru University Class Materials

Hi, everybody. Christian Wiles. Dan Weiss here. Welcome to I don't know how many installments of PlanGuru University we've done at this point, but it's it's quite a bit. But this is an exciting one because our new dashboarding and AI intelligence software that we've talked about many PlanGurus before this is is in production, and we've got dozens of users even though it was tax season when we rolled out. We got a ton of people using it and, couldn't be happier in terms of, how smoothly the onboarding process go has gone for such a big, huge rollout. So we're excited to, again, work that into everything we're gonna be talking about today, and, and welcome. So let me, I'm gonna just do some housekeeping here. I'll give Dan a second to introduce himself in a minute here. But this you do you know, this is six full hours, so you get seven CPE credits. So you do need to attend you know, you don't cut out twenty minutes early every time. You know, you gotta attend the full six hours to get the credits. We need you to attend eighty we need you to answer eighty percent of poll questions, and that's gonna get you your CPE. When you once you've once you feel like you've satisfied that, simply email p g u at PlanGuru dot com, and we'll get you your CPE certificates. And then, you know, there's sort of a second level to this. Folks looking for a certification, we can give you a little badge that you can put on your website. You know, obviously, mandatory, but, is, to get PlanGuru certified. And you can do that one of two ways. You can do that by doing you know, we're gonna give you a couple case studies as we go through this. If you complete those case studies and show them to us, we'll get you certified. However, I don't actually recommend that you work on a case study. I I recommend that you work on a real life project. Again, if you don't have any, if you're if you're new to this, if you're new to the fractional CFO game and before you spend time with a client, you want something to work on, hey. We, you know, jump in the case studies. But, preferably, you can pick a client and don't charge them anything and just get started with some real life project, and we can also then take a look at what you built and verify you that PlanGuru is certified. So in terms of what we're going to talk about class by class today, we're going to obviously, we're doing an introduction right now, but we're also gonna spend some time talking about why are you here. What what what types of services does PlanGuru facilitate? What type of internal processes do we facilitate, and how can you get the most out of the software? And then finally, I'm gonna kick it to Dan Luis, who's going to spend some time talking about setup and import, with a with a new PlanGuru model. So just a few more notes. If you're using PlanGuru internally, I do apologize. A lot of the curriculum here is geared towards, accounting firms, who either currently offer fractional CFO services or are attempting to offer fractional CFO services or, dedicated fractional CFOs. So, obviously, the lessons that we, anything we talk about in respect to a business adviser is applicable to you. But, again, sorry, but a lot again, a lot of my asides, a lot of our general comments are gonna pertain to, working with clients and things like that. So, hopefully, it's not too too much. Additionally, if you are an expert's fractional CFO, you will be bored during sections applying your university. We really try to you know, especially here in the first session, we really try to take it from the top, you know, take it for, you know, I don't know, the foundation and build up from there. So, again, apologize in advance to some of you who are just here to see the new, you know, features. Again, we will spend a lot of time on the basics. And, you know, it's not too late to get into this PlanGuru University semester. If somebody, you know, watches the recordings and talks to us and then they jump in for the last two sessions, we can still give them the CPE credit. We can even offer a makeup session if somebody, needs to. So just to give you guys a little background on myself, my name is Christian Wilege. I'm the CEO over here at PlanGuru. Prior to PlanGuru, I was the worldwide plan analyst at IBM. I for their sorry. The worldwide plan analyst of the global technology services group, building a thirty seven billion dollar budget in Excel, not, you know, not not, like, not a IBM product. Hopefully, I'm not violating any agreements I signed by telling you that and recording it and putting it on the Internet. But yeah. So I I will say a lot of my perspective, you know, like, some of the curriculum in here, some of the lessons that we teach, I'd say, are a symptom of of that corporate finance background. You know? And I try to take that lens and apply it to the smallest of businesses because we can apply those same principles to the smallest of businesses, but I don't you know, the a lot of times, I think the language in the small business space, you know, is too simplified to to to really help business owners understand what they need to be doing to make better decisions. Obviously, since I joined PlanGuru, I've worked with thousands of businesses. I've issued I you know, I did the calculation of ten thousand CPE credits many years ago, so it's probably something like fifteen now of of CPE credits in PlanGuru University and beyond. So, with me as always, is, Dan Weiss, who's, you know, probably the best single best PlanGuru user on the planet right now, probably better than me at this point, but I wanna say hi, Dan. Hello, everybody. Dan here. Very excited for you to join us, this session and this, semester of PlanGuru University. Like Krishna said, we have some really exciting stuff to show you. And I do see some fill familiar names in the attendees list here. So, again, thanks for joining. But for the folks that don't, know me, we who I haven't met yet, I'm an account executive with PlanGuru. And although I am focused, you know, mostly on the sales side of things, so, you know, talking to new people who are looking at PlanGuru solutions like PlanGuru and making sure it's a good fit for them. But, you know, once they decide that's the case, I'm also heavily involved in the implementation side of things too, so helping them get it set up. And, you know, we get down to the nitty gritty. Right? We do what's called blueprinting, where we dissect how the business operates. We go account by account, identify the ones that have the biggest impact on the business, things like breaking down revenue streams, payroll by employee, you know, balance sheet accounts that have a major impact on cash flow forecasting. And we really get into the detail of the drivers that are behind those accounts and, you know, try and get as accurate as possible. And also put together some really nice reporting packages so, you know, you can tell that story, based on what your targets are and what's actually happening, which, you know, Krishna is gonna talk about why that's so important. And, you know, with some of the new functionality that we're gonna show, you know, in class three and and throughout, you know, it it it just makes your life or your client's life way, way easier as opposed to doing this stuff, say, in Excel spreadsheet. So really excited to get started here. I will be monitoring the chat window as well as the q and a window. So you can ask a question question in either or, and I'll make sure to answer those to the best of my ability. And, yeah, let's kick it off. You know, Sally, for those of you who are here to see the new stuff, you know, it kinda is in the last class. But, and that no. That's not the same. I'm not wearing the same shirt as in that picture. It just kinda looks the same. I just realized that. Now everybody knows I only owe I only own one quarter zip. Yeah. You don't wanna know how old these pictures are. So just a little background on PlanGuru. The first version of PlanGuru came out in two thousand. We had we had two desktop products. We had another desktop product we released around two thousand ten, eleven. You know, doing financial modeling in a browser is not an easy thing to do. You know, you folks want instant responsivity when you change your browser when you change something in the model, and you don't wanna sit there and wait for fifteen seconds if something goes back to a browser and loads a new report or something in your window. You know? So we waited to go to the cloud until we knew we could deliver a fast, responsive, powerful thing. And, again, I gotta update my slide. It's it's it's more than twenty three years later. Shoot. I thought I I thought I scrubbed any typos then. I spent some time in here. But yeah. And we work with all types of businesses directly ranging from pre revenue start ups to large multinational corporations and everything in between. And, obviously, with the smaller businesses, a lot of those businesses are working with a business adviser who's got PlanGuru. But, you know, we we've really improved our the AI in our solution, both on the reporting side and the financial modeling side. We have a huge robust, library of tutorials. But, you know, at PlanGuru, we go beyond simply developing software. You know, we really spend a lot of time teaching advisers and businesses on how to make better decisions, train accounts, bookkeepers, advisers on how to provide these services and connect organizations that that are a good fit. And and finally, you know, you're you're never gonna find a you're never gonna find a company at our price point that has anything like the level of customer support we have. If there's anyone in here that's new, you know, again, we I can put any of our existing users on the spot, and they can tell you. We're here when you need us. You know, this is this is the hardest thing. Like, this is the Apex service. And, you know, when you're sitting there with a client that that maybe has four QuickBooks classes and you don't know, hey. Should I break this out by class, or should I just kinda import at the all classes level and keep this thing simple? You know, you could sit down. You could have a meeting with Dan, and I could give you one recommendation, and then you or he could give you one recommendation, then you can meet with me the next day. And I might give you a different recommendation because there is a lot of nuance in it depending on the questions we ask and the other context included in the conversation. You know? Two completely informed users might make two completely different decisions, and that's why we'd like to get together. You know, that's why if you're ever building a new model and you want some help, you'll always be able to get some time with myself or Dan, Wees. Or if you just have those quick questions, it's not like, hey. It's on some big existential problem. It's just, oh god. I don't know how to answer this question, and I wanna make sure I build this model right. Well, you can also pick up the phone. And, you know, I always say, call the support line first. You know, if nobody picks up, call call the sales line. You know? If you're doing an implementation for even if you're an existing customer, if you're building something new, if you're adding some more departments or adding some new users, or if you're adding a new client, that's sales. We're happy to help. And and, again, leave a message. If if if we're really jammed up and nobody can pick up the phone right there, leave a message, and someone's gonna call you back shortly. So just wanted to say all that before we get in here. So what's our first poll question? Do am I Dan, where where are they? Why Should be in the control panel there? Question one. Let's go to court. It's question one. So, before you know, how about this? Let's just get a sense for what best describes you. Are you gonna be using PlanGuru internally? Are you a dedicated fractional CFO that would prefer never to have any accounting responsibilities? But, you know, obviously, sometimes you get sucked in when you have to. Are you a traditional accounting firm, that does everything but has fractional CFO as a part of their portfolio? Sorry. Sorry. A traditional accounting firm that does not do fractional CFO and maybe doesn't even know if they wanna offer it, but you are getting here to learn and you wanna look and and potentially partner with a fractional CFO. And then and then the fourth option is a one stop shop, meaning you're an accounting firm. You can do the QuickBooks setup. You can close the books, and you can operate the fractional CFO meeting. And then finally, other. So, again, the I saw I saw that shift dramatically. So if you if you're a fractional CFO, the last thing you wanna have to do is open up QuickBooks. And maybe maybe you're a one stop shop, and the last thing you wanna but you're a fractional CFO, you make it a point not to own the accounting processes. If you're a one stop shop, you, would like to capture as much of the client's business as possible. Okay. Cool. That shifted quite a bit. Woah. Sorry. I almost just spilled my drink here. I'm gonna end the poll. Share the results. Okay. So, yeah, eight eighteen percent. So let me show you. Eighteen percent internally, eighteen percent fractional CFO, nine percent is characterize themselves traditional accounting services. Maybe you don't know if you wanna offer fractional CFO through in house or through partnership. One stop shop can do it all, wants to do it all, and then other. Other, if you could tell us if you could try to fit yourself into one of these boxes, the two others out there, that would be really cool in the chat field, and Dan will let us know next time we take a break. So why are we here? Why are you here? Okay? Back to my sort of IBM perspective. You know? When you're at IBM, you're sort of sort of kinda three when you're in accounting finance, there's sort of three parts to it, and I'll and I'll touch upon this in the I'll I'll touch upon the first one on the next slide. But most of the most of the folks are either in the accounting department, meaning they're, you know, talking to their team in the field, like, you know, can I book this revenue for this month? Do I you know, how this service contract, how am I supposed to amortize out this revenue and the service contract so that the people in the finance team have completely finalized good sound books that they could analyze and then do financial projections from. Right? You know, that's, the point of the finance team. So PlanGuru is the tool of the CFO, is the tool of the finance team or the finance department. And, you know, and we're sort of making the assumption that, you know, the books are closed. And, you know, again, that's not always the case that our customers come to us with either accounting house in order, But, you know, we can give you some advice on what you should do if your accounting is a mess, but, you know, it's not it's not somewhere we can help you. But, however, when the accounting house is in order and we have good data, then we can do all types of exciting things with that information. You know, the first is a budgeting process. Right? And what's a budget? A budget is a comprehensive set of goals of what we hope to achieve. It's aspirational. So if everybody does a good job, our our analysis of the market is correct, We can achieve five percent revenue growth and, and six percent profit growth by by cutting costs and becoming more efficient. And it's what we're gonna hold any team members accountable to. Right? There's multiple levels to this. In a true small business where the business owner is making all the big decisions, it's you and the owner, and and that's it. And sometimes the budgeting process, isn't as valuable. If it's just you and the owner and there's nobody to say, hey. You didn't hit your budget. What's going on? Then the the the the budgeting budgeting is about setting targets and holding people accountable to those targets. But the moment you have more than just the business owner, the more the the moment you have a sales manager who's important in making spend decisions and how we should travel and spend, online marketing resources, okay, Those people should be involved in a budgeting process, and and and they need to be and maybe it's just a fifteen minute touch point once a month where they look at their dashboard and they spin their their part of the forecast. But, again, the you've got you in the honor, and the and then the only thing you communicate to anyone outside of that core leadership group is the budget, what we expect you to do. Okay? Then you have a rolling forecast. What's a rolling forecast? After you met with the sales manager, after you met with the production manager, after you asked them a bunch of questions and gave them a whole bunch of ideas of how they can make better decisions throughout the month to make more money, you could come out of the room and you go, we ain't hitting that sales budget, are we? And you say no, and then you bust out the rolling forecast. Okay. So sometimes you do that. So, hopefully hopefully, you're saying, yes. Of course, we're gonna that we don't even need to spend any time on the forecast. It's perfect. But most of the time, you're gonna get into the forecast. And and, again, a forecast shouldn't be aspirational. It should be what you really think is gonna happen. And in the event that you're a cash strapped business, it should probably be slightly pessimistic. Right? Not just where we think we're gonna land, but let's say where we think we're gonna land, and let's dial it down five percent and still make sure we can meet our obligations and make the investments we need to make and make payroll and and do all that stuff. Okay? So budget aspirational, what we're driving towards, rolling forecast, sober assessment of where we're really headed for senior most leadership. And and and and quite frankly, those that that budgeting so month months over, books are closed. We go well, let's just say this. Every day and and we're gonna talk more about this in class three. But you might have two sets of deliverables to your client. You might might you might have a mid month scorecard where only those things that are pretty accurate on a daily basis are delivered to the client's desk every morning. Revenue. Revenue revenue hits the pay the system. It gets booked into QuickBooks. We can pull up a pie chart every morning that shows us revenue. Same with, payroll. Okay? We have a mid month scorecard that they can look at every day so they can log in and see how they're doing against their budget. And then at the end of the month, when the books are closed and everything's reconciled, then we have that end of the month exhaustive review where we compare the budget to the actuals. We hold team members accountable. We kick those team members out of the room, and then we respin the forecast. K? That is the bread and butter cadence for all the fractional c for most of the fractional CFOs we work with. K? The date the now that we have PlanGuru Analytics, our new reporting package, the daily deliverables delivered without any work, but the monthly deliverable becomes for a small client, for a two million dollar revenue single QuickBooks class company, that monthly pre meeting prep, it's not two hours anymore. It's it's it's twenty minutes. And then you jump into the meeting, you spin the forecast. And so all of this, what we have here today is gonna dramatically reduce the cost of delivering a much more robust thing to the client, and it's gonna transform your ability to serve clients with at a lot lower cost. And there's so much opportunity in the market, in that in that lower, middle, you know, that that safe you know, two to twenty million dollar revenue range. There's so much opportunity there. And with, you know, and with everything we're gonna take you through in this class, you're gonna be able to either, again, get in there and be that fractional CFO or recommend a fractional CFO, or, you're gonna be able to do it in house for the for the two folks that are that are trying to do this stuff internally. Strategic planning, we we can go up to ten years in PlanGuru. I don't wanna diminish strategic planning clearly once a year. You should get all the critical stakeholders, all the shareholders together. You should show a ten year projection, explain to everybody how much money they're gonna get over the next ten years, explain to everybody what the long term objectives are, and and and then the first year of that strategic plan is used as a guideline for building the budget. Right? So once a year, she get everybody together, have your debates about what the strategic direction of the company is. Are we do we wanna just pay a heavy dividend, or do we wanna try to grow and capture new markets? Everyone has that debate. Once that debate's been settled by ownership, you then can either use that same model because it's a small business. Right? So for larger businesses, you might need different models to do all these things. Right? You might have a detailed operating budget, but something higher level for your rolling forecast in your strategic plan. Or your you might your detailed operating budget might also be a forecast, but then you have a different PlanGuru project for your strategic plan. Finally, I'll just this is this is our home page, you know, if anyone don't recognize it, but we are also here for PlanGuru launch services. If if it's ever a how do I do it question or what should I do question, if you're a business adviser, it's probably gonna be free. If it if we get to the end of that meeting and you say to yourself, oh god. I'm really busy. I would you know, it'd be really and then we say, hey. You know, we can get this done for five hundred bucks, and it'll all be updated in there for you tomorrow morning. A lot of times folks say, oh, please. Yes. Absolutely. You know? And we save you ten hours of work or whatever it would have taken you. So we're here to offer all the guidance and support, when it comes to design and how to use the product. But when it comes down to building it, we offer, again, extremely reasonable support services, and we're really good and efficient at doing it. So okay. Let's do another poll question here. So if you are a business advisory firm, if you if you're one of those two in house folks hey, Dan. Did we get an answer on what those others were? No answer just yet. If you guys wanna share, you could type it right into Chatfield, and I'll see it. Uh-oh. We better get to the bottom of who this is. Well, we got one SBDC. Oh, cool. That's one. What let's Dan, do me a favor. See see who the SBDC is and, talk about it in our next poll break. Okay? So Again, if you are a business adviser, answer the question appropriately. If you're not a business adviser, you know, and you don't need CPE, you don't have to answer. However, if you do need CPE, just answer, just put something in there. Okay. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. Lot of, varying sizes of firms in here. Okay. So when a cuss when a when a when a when a new business comes to us and that business, you know, is again, let's say it's a two million dollar business. You got a business owner who hears about how they should budget and forecast all the time, they've stumbled across PlanGuru, and they they set up a meeting with Dan. And, you know, I kinda sort of break things down into there's three areas that you that these people need help. You know? First, and is it which an extraordinarily sized problem for us is that they don't have their systems set up right. Okay? You know? Or the people aren't communicating and using the systems to their fullest of their capabilities. Obviously, I'm gonna know, I'm a I was working with a customer who owns a hotel, small, single entity hotel, you know, decent size, but, you know, they didn't get their books closed till the twentieth of the month. And they were paying for Bill dot com, which, again, the majority of the stuff was either, you know, invoices coming in or bills they need to pay or, you know? And the the the person at the hotel was scanning all the bills and invoices, sending them in one big email to the accounting firm that sat on them for weeks, and then processed them all on the nineteenth of the month or whatever. I literally, I get on the call. I'm like, hey. I I go to a lot of I don't I never use any of these apps, but I go to enough trade shows to be dangerous. Can't she just get a Bill dot com app and scan these things herself, and then they magically show up in the numbers the next morning. Like, everybody tells like, Joe Woodard tells me they're going to. And he's like, well, yeah, but we'd have to get her a login. And I go, well, can we get her a login? And he's like, yeah. Yeah. No problem. You know? And it's so, again, if if if if all our problems in life were only that simple, you know, this would all be easy. But but my point is is that, you know, we need to have good processes in place, whether it's an internal team, whether it's an external accounting firm, so that we minimize the work the work work stream too. And that so that the more data we have that's real time, the more data that we can include in that mid month scorecard as opposed to that month end close. Like, again, when we get over into PlanGuru Analytics, you're gonna see we have the ability to create as many different dashboards as you want. But the more stuff the more we can make that mid month scorecard resemble the end of the month full diagnostic, the better we are. You know? And the more real time our data can be, the closer we can get to that and the more value that a daily dashboard has to your clients. So, you know, that that's kind of the first area that that folks need help. The second area is, you know, finalizing historical data so it's accurate, timely. Some transactions cannot AI cannot interpret every transaction. Sometimes, you know, two two systems aren't, you know, sometimes you just are forced to use some antiquated system, and it requires some series of manual journal entries. There's nothing you could do about it. You you know, and and you gotta handle it, and you gotta get it done. And and you wanna get it done in a timely fashion so that that that and you gotta act and if you're the fractional CFO, you gotta push the accounting firm to get things done on a timely basis. It can be an awkward conversation. I can tell you that that that conversation was fairly awkward because as it went along, it it the the more the conversation was like, well, there's what you know, what's the accounting firm still gonna be doing if she's got bill dot com and, yeah, pushing everything through. But, you know, that's the that's the that's the dinosaur accounting firm's problem that didn't be responsive to what their clients' needs were and what their clients wanted. So once we get fast phase two, the books are closed. We got clean numbers. We got accurate, timely, sufficiently detailed financials for the finance department. Then we can do our strategic planning, our budgeting, forecasting, our performance review, all that all that good stuff. So I thought I had a more specific poll question that pertained to this, but maybe we get rid of it. And finally, you know, like, when you do a good job with all this other stuff, the the tax and compliance just, you know, kinda becomes automated. So from my perspective, again, you know, I, this I don't have any, data to back this up. You know? But there's so many nonresponsive accounting firms that view that one to five million or that one to ten million dollar QuickBooks business simply from a compliance standpoint, a compliance and tax standpoint. And, oh, they didn't complain that they don't get the books closed till the twentieth of the month, so that must be good enough. And these arcane processes we have are fine because they're not complaining. You can come in to these businesses either yourself or with a good stable of partners. You can automate all the nonsense that should have been automated, reduce that so that no one has to do that anymore. You can come in bolt on the fractional CFO, come in at the same or similar price. Again, a lot of these business owners are happy to do certain functions in house and take that work off the accounting firm's plate and take it in house if it's this if it's literally the same amount of work they were doing before. You know? So, anyway, so if you could just do me a favor. Okay? And then this is an elaboration on the previous question. Just in the chat field, okay, which this is just again, I should have had the poll question aligned with this. But which description best fits you? You pry you provide primarily fractional CFO services and would prefer to avoid any business I call it I call it BPOP, not business process outsourcing, but business process optimization. We're not gonna necessarily outsource everything. We're gonna give the owner of the hotel bill dot com, the app bill dot com, and have them scan the thing so that instead of them sending pictures of the stuff for the accounting firm to scan the thing. Okay? So you you primarily provide fractional CFI and prefer to avoid any of that app in QuickBooks. You wanna be a one stop shop. You wanna be the one who comes in there, fixes up the QuickBooks, gets Bill dot com working, gets, you know, all the apps talking. You provide the business process optimization. You provide the accounting services to support a fractional CFO or in house CFO. However, you need to learn what the c sorry. You don't wanna do the CFO, but you wanna support the CFO. You're here you're here to know so that you're not that dinosaur accounting firm, so that you you know what a CFO needs. You know how to get the book set up so that if a CFO comes in, you can do it right. And you potentially be looking to refer to somebody to actually do the CFO work. Four is a hybrid. You you work with the small ones, but you find a partner for the big ones. And and five is I don't know yet. Sorry. Again, didn't mean to belabor all this stuff, but I like to provide a real, you know, good foundation of where everybody sits. So your team. Okay? We typically find that the best construct to do this stuff effectively, and it's kinda how we operate here at PlanGuru, our two person teams. You've got the true CFO who is gonna be driving those discussions about what the client needs from a budgeting and forecasting process. They're going to be, in their head, architecting what the PlanGuru model should look like by asking them questions about their business, asking them questions about the priorities, all in the context of what their budget for your services are. Then you have a budget analyst. They can go off and build that thing. You know? Because, obviously, if you're a smaller firm, you know, in the beginning, when you don't have a lot of clients, well, one person can totally do all these things. But once you start getting the scale, you know, it's a different set of skills. And, you know, it's a good, to be able to sort of share the the labor when it comes to that. You know, in terms of your process, whether you wanna do that internally for everything, you know, again, if you are it it's it's if you know the client needs some help on the accounting side, but you don't necessarily wanna do it, well, then you need to form the partnerships that you can turn to. And and, again, we for some of you who have been with us for a while, you know, we still do technically have our PlanGuru partnership program, and and and we occasionally do send out some leads that we source. But in, you know, in the back half of twenty twenty six, we're really gonna ramp that whole thing up. And the purpose of that is twofold. One is when our businesses need help, we can send a RFP out to all of you. But in turn, we wanna be a community for trusted business advisers to find complementary business advisers. So if you're that CFO and you need that, person you can turn to for ecommerce, you know, retail company, that can get their QuickBooks set up and get it talking to Shopify with all the different flavors of data the way we want it, well, then then you all of a sudden be able become able to sell. Okay? So many of your prospects aren't good candidates for these services because their back house back end house is not in order. You know? So like I said before, you know, if you don't if you if you don't have other employees to help you, we're here for you. Okay? Get you know, go solo. But larger organizations do need someone to be, you know, responsible for driving sales across the organization. We had too many large accounting firms. It's too compartmentalized, and, you know, everyone has their own clients, and there's not enough cross synergy. Whereas a lot of these newer companies are a lot of these newer accounting technology firms are growing up in a way where fractional CFO is being systematically pitched on a regular basis to every single tax customer, and that's where you need to get to. As I said before, you can partner with us as well. You know, we charge you a fraction of what we charge, directly. And yeah, couple more couple other final things to think about before I kick it. I'm gonna do one more poll question here. How much revenue does your typical customer or you? Okay. So if you're a business adviser, how much revenue does your typical customer generate annually? Alright. You know, again, do me a favor. Just if you could vote in the poll question even if you don't need the CPE, just, again, if you're not if you're not comfortable sharing some of the stuff, just you can lie. You know? But that way, if I can close the poll earlier, that's great. We're only at fifty three percent participated. I'm going to close the poll in five, four, three, two, one. Sorry, folks. I got my other screen over here. Okay. When it comes to delivery, you know, questions you need to ask yourself. What will you do on the front side of the paywall? You know, too too many folks, never do this because they you know, it's like a chicken and egg thing. You know? They, you know, wanna get the client to sign up for a fee, and I get it. You don't wanna do work for free, but you gotta get started somewhere. You know? And if and and a lot and the problem with a lot of your clients is that they they've never participated in a regular budgeting forecasting cadence. They don't they don't get it. They don't they don't see the value. So if you can get it set up again, I'm not some multi departmental company maybe set up one of their departments. Right? You're not gonna you're not gonna build out seven departments for somebody for free. But a single QuickBooks class user or maybe you pick the biggest department for your big client, and if you want to get with one of us, just run the import and let them live that first meeting. You know? You build the budget in December. At the end of it in the in the second week of February, show them their budget versus actuals. Show them their updated forecast. Take them down the p and l and the forecast. Take them down the balance sheet and the forecast. Spin the forecast with them. You can never there is no substitute for experiencing this cadence on a regular basis. So, I mean, once you get good at it and you got a whole bunch of customers and you can provide a whole bunch of referrals, well, then you can say, listen, buddy. You know, pay me up front. That's, you know, that's how this is gonna work, you know, because you've got because you got the business. But, again, I find a lot of, you know, folks that are dipping their toe in the water. They want you know, the they they want this to they sort of guaranteed profitable engagement from from the jump. And whether whether you're new to offering the service or whether you used to do it in Excel and you're just new to PlanGuru, I feel like it's worth it to invest some money in your in yourself and that relationship. And and my pledge to you in this is if you're working for free on it, I will help you for free. Okay? So, you know, if you need some help from myself and Tom, I need, you know, something built real quick. Again, I'm not I'm not offering to, do twenty hours of work for free for something. But if you got a if you got a new prospect and you're busy, but you think that prospect's gonna be a good case, let's get together. We'll work as a team to get it done. And if you're working for free, I'll work for free. Beyond that first beyond that, like, getting, you know, the engagements flowing and deciding whether or not you're gonna charge an upfront fee or whether you're gonna maybe get give them a month of service for free so they can get a flavor for it. Once you once you've established your business, you have a question of, are you do you charge a setup fee? Like, I mean, obviously, a lot of for for a lot of clients, you might put twenty hours into the setup, but then by the time you get to month three, you're you're putting in two hours a month as long as there's no fire drills going on. You know? So it's this balance of, like, if it doesn't work out after two months, wow. I'm really gonna take a bath on this. You know, Adam from Summit CPA said you know, he's always told me avoid impostor syndrome. Like, you you know, I jokingly say avoid impostor syndrome unless you don't feel comfortable in the beginning. You know? Like, you wanna, you know, ask for the upfront fee. You're worth it. You deserve it. That's where you're spending a lot of time. Share the risk. Like, if the client cuts out after two months, you don't wanna take a bath on that. However, you know, I would argue that by not charging an upfront fee, you could potentially make a lot more money in the long term because you charge a slightly higher monthly fee, and and that monthly fee stays fixed and it increases with inflation. And furthermore, right, your your so many of these potential prospects, as I said in the previous bullet point, so many of these potential prospects are new to this. They they've never sat in a budget meeting where you compare the budget to the actuals, hold a manager accountable, kick the manager out, and then respin the forecast. And so when you've never lived that experience, it's hard to see the value. So if you say to the client, listen. I'm gonna spend twenty hours building out this model, and I'm and I'm only gonna charge you fifteen hundred bucks a month going forward. Okay? I'm gonna charge you fifteen hundred bucks this month, next month, the month after, two thousand bucks again. Single QuickBooks class, small business, pretty simple. And and and and and you say to the client, like, if this doesn't work out, I'm willing to sign up to do all this work, and and I'm not gonna be making money until we get to the end of the year. Right? It's a compelling value proposition. You know? Again, it's not such a fun value proposition if the client burns you. And because the client doesn't put in the effort, it doesn't work. But I'd also say that's the doubles that's the double edged sword. You can make this promise to your client. Hey. I'm gonna set this up for you, and I'll give you two months for free. Or I'm not I'm sorry. I'm gonna charge you, fifteen hundred bucks a month, you know, for month one all the way through. I'm gonna do a ton of the work up front. And and, again, if it doesn't work out, I'm the one that loses. Sorry. I kinda lost my train of thought there. I'll I'll move on to the next point. But, you know, so if you can, you know, you can give the client one fixed fee for everything. Again, that's gonna enable you to achieve sort of the best value pricing. If you can replace what the traditional accounting firm was doing when they weren't using any good tech and weren't asking their clients what their actual needs were. If you can opt automate that, do that for a lot less, bolt on the fractional CFO, only charge them a little bit more than they were paying before, well, you're gonna have a really compelling offer. You know, I mentioned Adam Hale before from Anders, formerly Summit CPA, now Anders CFO. You know, they they're you know, as, unless somebody wants to correct me, I'd say they're really, preeminent, one stop shop, you know, in terms of them, doing everything and the scale that they've reached and the size. You know? And they have, you know, pretty clear and transparent pricing on their website, but it's all it's all flexible. So so yeah. Let's do one more poll question so Dan doesn't have to worry about them as much. Okay. So, yeah, what percentage of your clients build a budget and do monthly reviews currently currently? I'm gonna end the poll in five four three two one. So I I kinda remember what, you know, what I was thinking when I lost my train of thought. But, you know, once you get to a steady state, again, you don't wanna do you don't wanna do two, three months free. That seems, you know, desperate. Right? Like, you only do two, three months free when you're new to this and you're new to PlanGuru, and you just wanna get your feet wet. However, when you're selling a service that your client really doesn't understand and that the only way for them to understand it is to do it, You'd you know? Yeah. You're gonna be able to get some people to pay you for setup. You're gonna get some people to pay you for implementation, but there's gonna be a lot of people who aren't gonna pay a big upfront fee for something they don't understand. You know? So making that value proposition of I'm gonna put in all this time, and if it doesn't work out, I lose, is sometimes a requirement to get a certain type of business. And, again, it's the same type of business that's it's gonna be a simpler business. It's gonna be a smaller business where your time commitment's not gonna be extraordinary should it not work out. Okay. And I I am gonna just before I kick it to Dan, because we always do this. Okay? The first case study is the simplest thing you could ever imagine. It's just create a new PlanGuru scenario. You you can create it with don't create a whole new company for this, unless you don't have any companies yet. You can always delete it. But just go into an existing company, add a new scenario with five years, first three years by month, add fifteen accounts to the income statement, different account types, add ten accounts to the balance sheet. When you add a revenue account, simply manually enter a value, which we're gonna touch upon by the end of today, copy it off to the right, go to the balance sheet, see what that did. Go to the statement of cash flows, see what that did. Go add your next account. You know, go add a depreciate go add a depreciation account and link it to and then go create a accumulated depreciation account and link the two. Okay? Again, maybe that maybe that's a little too advanced for this challenge. But the point is by adding these accounts one by one, putting some balances in it, and then toggling in between the different financial statements, it's a, you know, it's a great way to really understand the most basic mechanics of our three financial statement integrated model. I do want you to add one basic variable on the assumptions and KPIs tab. So go to your assumptions and KPIs tab and add, like, a unit sold. And then I do want you to link just one attempt. Well, I don't think we're gonna get we're not gonna get into assumptions and KPIs yet. So I do, we do have a video tutorial on how to use that method. So I do for most of the other accounts, you can just do manual entry. For a cost account, you can just make it a percentage of revenue. But, again, it's the most I don't even care about you using the forecasting method so much as just understanding the most basic mechanics of the PlanGuru model. Okay. I'm gonna go off cam here, and, kick it to my colleague, Dan Elise, who's going to, take you through the the first portions of, you know, setting up your PlanGuru company and model. And I will stop my share. Yes. Thank you, Christian. I'll go ahead and share my screen. And everything Christian just described is gonna make a lot more sense for the folks that have have never done those things before here in a moment because we're gonna take, everything, all those slides that PlanG, that Christian just went through and apply them in practice here. Right? We're gonna start building out a real life model within the software. So, if everybody could see my screen okay, should be the login screen. This is how we're accessing accessing PlanGuru. App dot PlayingGuru dot com is the URL. And I'm gonna go ahead and log in to my tutorial account here. And the first thing you see is the home screen. Right? This is a home base. This is where you're selecting which company files you'd like to work on, as well as adjusting things like your profile and preferences. Real quick, we're gonna touch on this. We're gonna come back to it later, when we, you know, focus more on collaboration. But this is an area where you can adjust, you know, your profile name, your email, your password. You can adjust the plan that you're on, as well as adding users. So I'm currently on an adviser plan. We also have a direct to business plan. They work very similarly, except in the adviser plan, you can add what are called adviser users. So that's folks within your firm that you're working on models with as well as client users. Obviously, the clients you wanna give this access to, and each client will have access to their respective company, not the others. Right? And you can set permissions. Internal users are free. Like, obviously, there's additional charges for company users. Yes. Yes. So to clarify, Advisor users, as long as they share the same email domain as you, you can add as many as you'd like at no cost. Client users, there comes with, you know, each company comes with one, but you can add additional client users for an additional charge. And like I said, we'll come back to that later. So right here represents the list of my client companies. Right? Now, if you were using this, you know, direct to business internally, right, you would just have one company there. Right? You don't need to have multiple companies, that you're working on. But as an adviser, I can select any one of these and see the files that I've created. Right? So this expands. The next layer is called a project, and we're gonna walk through a brand new one here in a moment. And then the final layer is either a business unit or a scenario. Right? So this franchise fast food sample company here, we have three separate locations that we're budgeting for, forecasting for, reporting for, all at the location level, as well as the consolidation level. Right? We're able to consolidate those and roll those up. We could do multiple tiers of consolidations. So if you had, you know, a parent company with subsidiaries and those subsidiaries had departments that you wanted to budget for individually. Well, we can add a third layer here. There can be multiple levels of consolidations. We're gonna cover that more in class two, or is that beginning of class three, I believe. But to show you the ex difference between what we call a consolidation project, which is what I just showed you, and there's another example right here, departments rolling up to a consolidation. There's also a single entity project where you could have multiple scenarios instead of business units. So base case, high case, low case. You know, you start with the base case, plug in all the numbers you feel like are most likely to happen, and duplicate it for a more aggressive approach where you're tweaking the numbers higher or a more conservative approach, you know, for a low case there. So we're gonna start, you know, from scratch here. Just to Notice Oh. Okay. Yeah. Go go ahead, Dan. I'll weigh in. Yeah. I was you you're probably about to bring this up too. This button right here, this is what we're gonna focus on in class three. This is the brand new reporting and dashboarding, AI powered reporting and dashboarding feature we've recently added powered by Reach reporting. You know, if you're just trying to get right to the reports after you log in, you can click that button. Second tab appears. It'll bring you straight to the reports. What we're about to go through is the modeling side of things. So actually building out the dataset, right, the budget, the historical data, the rolling forecast that the analytics tool will eventually feed off of. So we're gonna create a company here. Click this big green button there. And we're gonna name this. This is off a, you know, fictional QuickBooks company file of a bike shop, so I'm just gonna call this Dan's Bikes here. So you're giving the company a name. Entity type, you know, most of the time, it's gonna be corporation, limited liability. But if you're a nonprofit partnership, you could choose a different entity type there. The most important selection that you're making on this screen is this first month of the fiscal year drop down. Right? What's the first month of your fiscal year? If it's just a regular calendar year, right, you're just gonna stick with January. But, you know, if it's a nonprofit, retail company, whatever it might be, you can choose whatever company you'd like there. That's important because all of the files underneath this company that you're creating will inherit that setting. Right? And that cannot be changed after the fact. So that's the most important piece there. Country, state, ZIP code, I think it does make you do a ZIP code, so we'll just go with that. And the other two options here, you do not need to address right away, something like edit pro payroll taxes. You could always come back to this later. This is allowing you to eventually break down payroll and payroll related expenses, you know, by employee, incorporating different federal and state payroll taxes, including wage limits. And just to give you a little taste of this, when you click that, a table appears. It starts out as blank, but you can add taxes where you can name the tax, select whether it's federal states, select your state, tax rate, tax cap, and save those rates to that table, which you can then eventually, reference later. We're gonna be doing an entire breakdown of the payroll and payroll related expenses in an assumptions tab, I believe in class two, towards the end of class two. So we're gonna go through that in detail. And then last but not least, before we click submit here, company subject to that GST value added tax. You know, the the that's for our friends, you know, overseas in the UK, Australia, you know, also Canada. Any company that's, you know, requires value add, tax tax calculations, you can choose both the accrual or cash method and add some rates associated with VAT as well. But, you know, if you're US based, you won't need to worry about that. You can leave that unchecked. We go ahead and click submit there. Alright. Now it creates the company. Now it's asking us to create our first project. Think of a project within PlanGuru as essentially a file folder. Right? A file folder that houses all the different budgets and forecasts that you're creating. You might also create different projects for different exercises. Like Christian mentioned, you know, in one of his beginning slides, you have the budget that you're creating at the beginning of the year. It's the targets that you hope to achieve if everything goes to plan, and you can have a detailed operating budget, you know, by checking that box. And you notice when I check that box, it starts to give me a name here. Right? But then you also have, you know, forecast if you wanna attach a rolling forecast, you know, beyond the first year budget and you wanna forecast out two or three years by month. You could see where you're gonna be at, you know, from a cash flow perspective based on your, you know, sales goals. You could do that as well. And you could also check the box for a strategic plan. So you can have all three exercises within a single file. Like Christian said, you can go out to ten years and, you know, use that first year as the basis to building out your budget and forecast, or you can have separate projects. If you want to create a detailed monthly breakdown, operating budget, and rolling forecast that goes out three years, completely separate from a separate, you know, project that's going out ten years and not broken up by months, this annual amount's ten years, and you're using some high level growth rates and historical trends to come up with that strategic plan, that can be two separate projects. Right? So for this example, we'll just do a budget slash forecast here. I will change the date because we're in twenty twenty six. The next thing you wanna address here is this question on the right. How is your company structured? Like I mentioned, there is a single entity project. We're budgeting at a top level, one set of financials, one income statement, one balance sheet, one cash flow, but then you can have multiple scenarios. Right? And then you have consolidation of multiple departments slash divisions. We really call these business units because it could be a location. It could be a subsidiary, you know, different entities that you're rolling up. You have the have that ability as well. So, you know, this will designate whether this project has the ability to do consolidations or not. We're gonna keep it simple here today and stick with single entity. Project name, you can change it to whatever you want, you know, based on what you're checking up here. It's gonna give you a default name. And you'll see these little tool tips, you know, if you're interested in seeing, you know, what these represents and, you know, by making this selection, what happens on the next next screen, stuff like that. This is all coming from our in house virtual tour guide that you could access on the bottom right hand side here. There's a little bit of a button here where you can ask some questions. This is AI powered, so this will search through our knowledge base and produce answers based on what you're trying to do, which is really useful. And then lastly here is whether or not you're gonna be using account numbers. So, you know, if you're using QuickBooks, what does your account string look like? Is it four digits, five digits, any dashes, periods? You know, if you're using an accounting system, that's more robust and you are doing this for multiple business units, maybe it's something like NetSuite or Sage Intact, and you have department codes and company codes and project codes in that account number. Right? This is where you're defining that. And it's super important for consolidation purposes because notice when I say yes, it asked me to enter my account mask, and it gives me a legend of letters down here. Right? So a is the natural account portion, s is subsidiary or company code, b represents department code, and o is pretty much the catchall for all others with some examples down below. So simple account number, just a natural account, four a's. Here's one with a five digit natural account and a three digit department code. So that's five a's and three d's. Right? And you can, you know, go farther than this. Right? If I had, you know, five digit natural account, three digit department code, you know, two digit company code, and then, you know, maybe a three digit project code. It could look something like that. Those are pretty rare, few and far between. We're gonna keep it simple here today and just go with a four digit natural account number here. So four a's is what we're gonna stick with. Now, if you're not using account numbers, no worries. You could just select no there. Right? And PlanGuru is gonna import data based on your account descriptions, and you could also do consolidations based on your account descriptions instead. So we're gonna click submit. Alright. So now that we've added the company, and we've also added our first project to that company, it's asking us to add our first scenario to that project. The default name is called base case. Again, you can change that to whatever you'd like. You know, twenty twenty six budget slash forecast financial plan. You know, those are, you know, some common names that we see. So this is what I was gonna say earlier, but I decided this would be a better place to say it. I and then I and I might even you know, we wanna give people the right cues here so that it makes it obvious. Like, you know, I think the best thing to title your you know, if you are in in the most likely situation, you're going to be working with a business where you're gonna be comparing budget to actuals each month, and then you're reforecasting. And you're gonna spend most of the time in that model. I like to call it current forecast. K? Now the obviously, if you have multiple departments, it's location one or whatever. Obviously, if you're actually doing a base case, high case, low case for the bank, then call it base case. But the most probable situation is you're just sitting down there getting ready to do all the things we talked about earlier, because that you can compare the budget to the actuals, you can reforecast. If you call it current forecast, that's gonna typically be the scenario you're always in. Now most of these smaller business situations, you don't have a board that's ever gonna say, wait a minute, Dan. What did you say that what was that forecast you gave us in the last board meeting? I wanna see that again. Like, you know, in real life, when it's just you and the business owner and all you care about is making good decisions, you don't even need to save old forecasts. Okay? But if there is a situation where there's a board or a bank or investors that you're showing the forecast to and you may be asked to one day revisit said forecast, then you can save off different iterations like January forecast, March forecast, again, sort of after the fact as you keep it rolling. So, again, in the normal predicament, we're not doing multilocational, are we, though, on this one? No. No. I was just gonna Yeah. I was gonna take it a step further because I completely agree, and I'm glad you brought that up. I you know, you could even add some dates in here. And the reason why I do that, you know, said, we'll do today's date. You know, when we're eventually pulling this data over to our, analytics tool, it's actually really important that, you know, these these scenarios and business units have very unique names. When that data is pulling over, it's pulling everything over for the company. So if you have multiple projects, and in one project, you've created a a a scenario called base case, and then you created a brand new one and also called it base case, you know, know, you're gonna have two scenarios on the analytics side to choose from in a drop down that both say base case. Right? And you can pretty much figure out which one they are by selecting them and see what the numbers are when they appear. But, you know, it'll be much easier on yourself to identify, you know, what is what by giving them unique names as much as possible. So we'll stick with current forecast here. Budget year. This is the year that we're starting our budgeting and forecasting process. That's gonna default to a current, you know, date here, twenty twenty six. How many years would you like to project? So based on the option I chose, check that box for forecast. It's gonna default to three years, but you can change this. If you wanna do a five year plan, ten year plan, you just make that adjustment here. And then break down projected years by month through. Right? So by selecting three, it defaults to all three of those years be broken being broken up by month. But say I just wanted to do the first year broken up by month and have twenty twenty seven and twenty eight just be annual amounts, I don't need to see the monthly detail there. I can select twenty twenty six, and it'll give me a little note there saying, you know, some of those years will behave differently, right, since we're crossing from a monthly to an annual calculation. Right? So it gives you a little heads up there. I usually like to keep it, you know, consistent and break down all the years by month here. Now, if you did choose something, anything beyond three years, four, five, all the way through ten, it will also show you that the most you can break down by month is three years. Right? And I'll give you that that message as well. That is, you know, a foundational setting within PlanGuru. That's how we designed it. We don't get a ton of requests for four, five, all the way ten you know, out to ten years broken up by month. So the max that you can break down those projected years by month is through three years. In this case, year four and year five will just be annual amounts. We're gonna stick with three there. Forecast month. So based on the budget year and where we are at within that year, where do we wanna start our projections? Right? You could just start with January if you wanna create a full year by month budget and forecast. Right? There's no harm in doing that. But say we're sitting here in May, and you have your books closed through April, you can select May as your forecast month. What that means is that actuals will appear through April, and you're starting your projection process from May on. Right? And that's a one way street. Right? So if you select May here, we can't turn it back to January. Right? So that's a decision you're making up front saying, okay. I'm done with January through April. I don't need to do any budget versus actual comparisons for those those years. I wanna start this in the current month and do all that stuff going forward. Right? If you have an idea that you want to, you know, have the ability to do a full year budget versus actual comparison, go back to those, you know, beginning months in the year and report on them and, you know, have some budgeted numbers to reference, then stick with January. Stick with that first month of your fiscal year. Right? Because you can always move it forward. You can't move it back. So we're gonna stick with January in this case. Hey. When you are sitting, like, if you are like, specifically this time of year, okay, you actually have a client that you built a budget for last year. Like, you know, there there is an existing budget, or maybe they came up with their own internal budget that wasn't in PlanGuru. Obviously, if you're using PlanGuru, they might have a budget, then you won't have this problem. But let's say you've got a new PlanGuru client and there is some form of existing budget. Well, even though you're starting in May or something. Yeah. You still set your forecast month up for January. We can then import that budget via Excel, archive the budget, which we'll show you later, and then you roll it forward. Okay? That's really important. We should even have, like, a notification on the screen almost. Like because a lot of people, they they set it up for a May forecast month, and then they and then they go in and build a bunch of stuff, and then they go, well, how do I get my budget in here? Well, that ship has sailed. Right? Yeah. So anytime you come here with a preexisting budget, set it for January, load the budget, and then roll it forward. Yeah. That's that's a somewhat common exercise we see, and you'll see how that works once we go through the Excel import process today of how, you know, if you do have a budget, whether it's in QuickBooks or Excel, you know, we can format it correctly and import that, lock it down, and then then you could start using all of PlanGuru's tools to make adjustments to those numbers and, you know, reforecast going forward. Then lastly, up at the top right, this is referencing historical data. By default, it's three years' worth of historical data. So set to twenty twenty three, it's gonna bring in twenty three, twenty four, and twenty five. You can bring it up to five years' worth of historical data. And all five of those can be broken up by month if you'd like. If you just wanna bring in annual amounts, you say none. Right? It's just gonna be five columns, all annual amounts for those years. We'll stick with three. Break it up by month. Alright. So once you like everything here, submit. And based on all those settings, it's gonna start putting together the framework of your model, that we can then start populating. So this window is the first thing that appears. Gives you a option to either import your unique chart of accounts and historical data via our, integrations or manually add data. I'm gonna be doing a QuickBooks import here in a moment, but I wanna at least show you how to manually add data. So maybe you're a business adviser and you're working with a start up. They don't even have an accounting system in place yet, and they're building, you know, a business plan to go take to the bank or some investors to, you know, get some funding, get their idea off the ground, you can add accounts to these sections manually. So if I click manually manually add data, you can go to, say, the revenue section here, right click, add account. So that's here adding lines in here. Right click, add account. You can give it a name, give it a account number, select a projection method for it. We'll be going over those later. Click add, and that will add it to that section. And you could do that, you know, as many times as you need to start building out all of your revenue accounts, operating expenses, eventually move over to the balance sheet, and the cash flow will automatically generate for you. Another common use case of manually adding an account is, you know, say, you imported a chart of accounts and, you know, there is multiple revenue streams, but in the revenue section, there is only one account that says sales. Or there's only one account that says accounts receivable. Right? But there's multiple buckets of AR based on different terms, collection terms. Right? You're able to add additional accounts in here that live separately from what you're doing in QuickBooks, but their purpose their their purpose is for forecasting. Right? So you can get more granular with your budgeting and forecasting, have a more detailed chart of accounts in PlanGuru than you do in QuickBooks by adding accounts in here manually. And we'll probably do some examples of that in class too. Delete this one, no? Right click deletes. Alright. So, to import from QuickBooks, we're gonna expand this left side menu bar here, select imports, financial statements. These are import options. We're just gonna do QuickBooks and Excel today. Xero works the same exact way as QuickBooks. So same steps that you're seeing for QuickBooks can be done by, you know, clicking connect to zero and connecting to zero as well. So when you connect to QuickBooks or click that button, this is the first thing you'll see. First question is, will your PlanGuru company be connected to a single QuickBooks company? Right? One to one connection. The default option is yes. But if you're in a situation where you're creating a, you know, consolidation of multiple QuickBooks company files, right, say for a parent company, and you eventually wanna consolidate those, PlanGuru has that ability. Right? We can connect to multiple QuickBooks company files by selecting no there. But we're gonna go with yes in this case. Do you wanna automatically refresh QuickBooks data daily? That's also defaulted to the to yes. So that means every single night, PlanGuru's automatically ping QuickBooks. So when you log into PlanGuru, you're looking at the most most up to date actual data. Right? So all the entries, you know, going back to what Christian said about bill dot com, those, you know, receipts that you're uploading, stuff like that, all that work that's done in QuickBooks, if you don't wanna manually import that every single day or, you know, however often you'd like, you can set it and forget it with that option there. Now if you do want more control, you know, some of our customers, like to wait until the books are closed every single month to bring in actuals and they want more control on when data's coming into PlanGuru, all you gotta do is switch that to no. But it is if it is switched to yes here, you could select your time zone on when that data's coming in every single night. We're gonna connect to QuickBooks. Once we're happy with our selections there, it's gonna have me log in. Type in your password. Nope. Alright. So if you are a business adviser, this is where your list of client companies you have access to would show up here. You'd select one of those companies, click next, And now, that connection is live. So the next screen you're gonna see is how you want this information imported into PlanGuru. We have the ability to apply filters. So if you are you're using classes, you're using locations, customer fields, things like projects and different customers. Right? Those can be applied here. You know, we're in this example, we're importing at a top level, so we're gonna leave this unchecked. We wanna bring in all data, you know, for all three financial statements, or actually income statement and balance sheet. But, you know, again, going back to that situation where you have a consolidation model and you wanna import by departments and you have those departments split out by class, you'd be able to select a specific class all from here, which lines up with the corresponding PlanGuru business unit. So we're gonna leave that unchecked. Accounting method, we're gonna stick with accrual. And then, we are gonna be importing both the income statement and balance sheet. If, you are in a situation where you're doing consolidation and you have those departments and you selected a class, meaning you just wanna import the income statement, you can choose that. Or at the consolidated level, right, if you import all those departments, roll them up into a consolidated income statement, and at that consolidated level is where you wanna bring in your balance sheet, where you can select that option right there. It will only bring in the balance sheet based on that selection. We're gonna bring in everything here, income statement and balance sheet. Run import. So you're gonna start seeing a loading screen. Import in progress. And eventually, this is going to take us to a mapping window where you'll see all of the accounts are gonna be automatically mapped based on the account types you've already established within QuickBooks. But it gives you a chance to remap if you feel like you need to. Playing Guru and QuickBooks do a good good job putting everything where it needs to go. But if do need to, you know, switch up a cost account and, you know, put it in the operating expenses or vice versa, You're able to do that on that screen or reorder accounts into the order you prefer. That's gonna be next up. It might be a good time for a poll question too while we're in here, Christian. Gotcha. How many employees work at your firm? Employees work at your firm. Okay. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. That that's a strange bifurcation. Yeah. Yeah. Got them, heavy on both sides of the spectrum there. First interesting poll result in a while. Alright. So and those loading times you just saw are completely normal, and it does take a couple minutes to, load this up. So that's another reason why setting it to, have it automatically update overnight is, preferred so you don't have to, you know, run that manual import every day. I mean, that this is the initial setup and import, process. So, I mean, this is gonna take a lot longer than nightly refresh of the data. So just Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, nightly refresh of the data, you don't have to do anything. But even subsequent manual imports will load faster than the initial import that you're seeing here. So this is the mapping window. On the left hand side would be unmapped accounts. Notice that's blank. On the right hand side, we have some tabs at the top that represent the different sections of your balance sheet and income statement. And those are further broken down into subsections like current assets, property and equipments, other assets, And all of the accounts are mapped to those subsections based on the account type within QuickBooks. And each one of these lines shows the account number, the account description, the PlanGuru account type that they've been assigned, which you can change via this drop down if you need to, or you can unmap an account as well. There's a little x button here on the right hand side. Sometimes folks tell me it's you know, they have trouble seeing it, so let me know if you cannot. But if you hover over your mouse there, it'll it'll say on map. And like I said, you know, PlanGuru does a really good job putting everything where it needs to go with the correct account type. But for whatever reason, say you needed to, you know, move bike purchases down to operating expenses or something like that. Right? You click on map. It's not what I wanna do. Escape. So I guess there we go. So on map, shoots it over to the left hand side. It's as simple as clicking and dragging over, and it'll drop right down to the bottom there. There it is. Like, on map it again, and click and drag over to bring it right back. If you're doing this again, right, you've already imported, the initial import brought in your chart of accounts, data, you then realized something else needed to be remapped or you want to, you know, delete an account, you can do that. Right? After you import the accounts, you can right click delete. Those deleted accounts will show up in the unmapped section right here. And you can check this box to, you know, see those. A lot of times, you know, if there's a bunch of accounts that don't have activity within QuickBooks, maybe you gotta clean up the QuickBooks chart of accounts, you're not using those accounts anymore, you could just choose to unmap those on the initial import, or you can delete them later, and they'll just stay in that deleted section right there. There's also zero balance accounts that are automatically not coming in, but you can choose to map those. That means there's just been no activity in that accounts over the course of the historical range that you selected. Right? But if you feel like you need to budget for that account, there's going to be activity in it in in the future. It's just mapping it by clicking and dragging over. So this looks good to me. We're gonna click next here. Oh, before I click next. Couple special accounts in here, special line items. One of them is cash. So notice all of my cash and cash equivalents accounts by having this designation, this account type called cash. What's gonna happen here is cash is a special accounts that is automatically projected for you going forward. So all of these accounts are gonna get grouped into one line called cash and cash equivalents. If for whatever reason you wanna have more control on one of these accounts and you don't wanna include it in that overall cash projection, you can just change it to other current assets, and it'll show up like the rest of the other current assets. Otherwise, they're all grouped together. Same thing with retained earnings. That's also a special account within PlanGuru that automatically calculates for you based on your projected net income and previous month's retained earning balance. So anything with the retained earnings designation also gets grouped into a single account. If you want it separate, set it to capital. Alright. So once you've established the mapping, it gives you another window where it gives you a chance to reorder the accounts. You know, by default, it'll just be in the account number order, which is typically what most people like. But for whatever reason, you wanna, you know, move these up and down, you can reorder these. And this is usually the best place to do it, the initial imports. There is the ability to move accounts after the fact, but this is the easiest way to do it right here. And let's see. In the income statement, I I wanna move this one back up. Right? This is the one I remapped and went to the bottom. So let's move that back up based on the account number. So, again, that's just a click and drag. Do so. But everything looks good. Right? Order, the income statement, balance sheet, and we're gonna go ahead and click imports here. This also usually takes a minute or so to load, so good chance for another poll question. And if anybody has any questions based on anything they've seen from a setup and import process standpoint, this is a great time to type it into the q and a field or the chat field. K. I'm gonna close the poll in five four three two one. Okay. There you go, Dan. Alright. So as you could see, we now have a populated income statement as well as a balance sheet. Here we are. Notice what's happening in the balance sheet. We got some numbers in the balance sheet while in the income statement, we do not just yet. What's happening in the balance sheet is just taking our most recent historical balances and pushing them forward until we adjust them based on projection methods that we've selected. Right? So there's December twenty five. That's why you're seeing those same values going across as flat. And then back on the income statement, there's some historical data I've imported three years by month. This is some sample data, so it's it's not the best here. But what you could also do once you have your chart of accounts imported here is you can create account groupings. So basically, mimic the account structure you have within QuickBooks where you have sub accounts rolling up into parent accounts. So that's as simple as highlighting the accounts that you want to group together. This is a click and drag. And it could be, you know, as many counts as you want. And once you have them highlighted, you can right click. This window appears, and you give the group a name. You can even give it an account number if you wanted to. You don't have to, though. I'm gonna click create group. Two things are gonna happen. You're gonna see a header for the group as well as a total. Now, in order to create a group, the lines that you're grouping together need to be contiguous. Right? In line with each other. Meaning, I can't take this line and group it with this line. Right? Because they're not right next to each other. So I'd have to move this account up or this one down first and then create the group. But once the group is created, you can expand and collapse it. Collapsed, it will show the total. Expanded, you will see the detail. And you could do that on your income statement and your balance sheet. And like I mentioned, even after you've imported your chart of accounts that exist within QuickBooks, I can still come in here and add brand new accounts. Right? Say you wanna forecast a new revenue stream that doesn't even exist yet, but you wanna include it in your in your forecast model. Right? You can add accounts in here, you know, mess around with the projection methods for it. You know, if you like it, you keep it. If you don't, you delete it. And that's just a right click, add accounts. It looks like we might have a question here. For the training purposes, can I just make up the numbers if I don't want to link PlanGuru with an active client QBO? Absolutely. Absolutely. So you can kinda take the approach of just adding accounts manually or if you're, what we're about to show you, what Christian's about to hop into, is an Excel imports. So if you wanna put together a, you know, test, a test list of a chart of accounts that you wanna import via Excel because you don't wanna sit here and add them individually one by one, you could do that too, and you can totally make up those numbers for the, case study. I mean, we only you have QuickBooks files, we'd only recommend doing that under the most extreme circumstances. Like, you know, if you if you don't have QuickBooks files, I get it. But, anyway, I mean, it's just the QuickBooks import's gonna make your life a lot easier. I mean, obviously, sometimes people want a different structure, and, like, they wanna modify it tremendously from the standards. So, you know, in those circumstances, it might it might not make sense to use QuickBooks files, but, yeah, most of the time, you're make your life a lot easier. Go ahead. It is the fastest way to get data into PlanGuru for sure. It's the direct connection with QuickBooks. So with that said, a good segue to another way of getting data into PlanGuru. And we're gonna touch on this a little bit here. It's not only financials, but also assumptions you can import via Excel. But if you are using any other accounting system we do not integrate with directly, maybe industry specific accounting software, we can still bring in that data via Excel. So I'm gonna stop sharing here. Just as an aside here, folks, as I I'm gonna I'm gonna let's do, we're we're good on the time with the poll questions. But We are by the next time we reconvene PlanGuru University, we we will have a Google Sheets integration as well. K? We're gonna continue to support our Excel import, but Google Sheets is the most connected software on the planet. And what it enables us to do is to API into thousands of systems in the middle of the night and arrange the data exactly as we want it for import into PlanGuru. You know? So this can, you know, help in two ways. Right? One, is, to, again, just get, you know, obviously, financial statements. Right? Like, a lot of accounting niche industry specific accounting systems, things like that. You know, we do plan on developing direct connectors, Sage Intacct and HubSpot or sorry, Sage Intacct and NetSuite. But the the the Google Sheets integration is gonna be able to to connect everything in the interim. But it but it's also gonna be able to connect to nonfinancial data, like, data from Salesforce, data from HubSpot, data from other types of of, you know, business systems that we can get into PlanGuru. So we're really excited about that. You know, it's gonna be pretty transformational and, you know, getting data from all types of systems updated in the middle of the night every night just like we can do for QuickBooks. So, I I'm just gonna quickly Probably worth mentioning too, Christian, what's right around the corner is a QuickBooks desktop integration too. Oh, yeah. I mean, I I was joking with someone earlier today. I'm like, the QuickBooks desktop, you know, is, like, my groundhog day. Because we we've been working on it forever, but there anytime something else you know, it always got kicked to the curb. Right? Like, anytime, you know, some something else would come up. But we are legitimately in testing for it now, so, that's gonna be really huge. Okay. I don't need to spend time on this. So I'm gonna demonstrate the I should have done this before. And So good. I got two I think I have two years of historical. Well, I'll just set it for three anyway. Okay. So, I'm gonna go ahead and run our our Excel import here. I have the Excel file that I'm gonna drag, in my Windows Explorer. I drag it, drag and drop, release it, and click upload. Once we click upload, we have two options here. For now, we sorry. For now, we only have one option. But in the future, after we've imported one time, we do have the quick import option if the format of what you're importing is the same as what you imported last time. So many of the aspects of this mapping process, we really only have to do once. Okay? So I am going to, you know, there's a there's a handful of ways to use this. Actually, let me just open up the file so you can see it. My You know, I gotta update my date formats in, in my spreadsheet here because Dan, do you know why my headers aren't showing here? And oh, yeah. Sorry. What did it do? Convert them to a numerical value? Yeah. It it always does that. It just it it takes whatever is in the Excel file and converts it to a a number format. So that's why you're seeing the numbers at the top there, but that really represents January, February, and so on. Yeah. So if you look at my Excel sheet here, we got January twenty four through, December twenty five. Okay? There's a few different ways to tag things up. The first thing we need oh, I didn't I didn't set this up. Shoot. I should have set this up with account numbers, shouldn't I have? No. It's okay. You could just tag the account name in the second column, and and this will show what it what it looks like without account account numbers since I already did account numbers anyway. Yeah. So So if you didn't have account numbers, you could do it this way. So we basically gotta take these blocks and assign them is essentially what it's telling us. So I take this I take account name. I drag and drop it to the top of the column with account names, and I'm oh, damn. What am I doing wrong? Why is it there we go. Sorry. You put in I was on mute. Yeah. You just gotta drop it in that blue cellar. Yep. I I don't demo this too much. I should've let Dan keep doing it. I'm a little rusty. So as again, I'll just unassign that. So we take the account name variable. We drag it to the top of the column with account names. We release it. I should have set this up for account numbers. If I did, I would drag the account number marker over here. But what I'm doing is I'm assigning these in twelve month blocks. So I'm grabbing January of twenty four. I'm dropping it here, and it's essentially tagging up the next twelve months. So two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. And then this column is then the oh, I've lost it already. I I like to put a spacer in between my columns. So one, two, three. So it's this one. Okay? So I basically tagged up these two twelve month blocks by just dropping the first month, the twelve month block in there. And, again, if I had a separator in between my two year columns, it would it would be a lot more logical. And, obviously, again, we gotta, I don't know. Dan, is there a preferred format that it won't reformat it into these numbers? Not that I know of. I believe it always does. That's why I like, my personal preference for the month format selector here is the one that you just selected. Yes. Discrete month or series of months because you don't have to worry about, you know, dropping the twelve month block on the correct column there. You know, this is where you can just do them all in one shot here. And you don't even actually have to check all of them. You can just go to the last go to the last, column or the last But I don't want the first year. I set this model up for three years, but I only have two years of data. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. So I I don't I can't select the first year. Yeah. So I've just selected the you know, I put I put the cursor over January of twenty four. And then since they're all twenty four consecutive months, I selected those next two. Again, in a normal circumstance, you'd be able to just click them all, but I, set this model up with an extra year of historical data. Oh. Okay? So once I There was another section there too. So, it said actual or forecast slash budget. So going back to the example that Christian mentioned where you already have a budget that you wanna import and it's in Excel, you'd be doing it the exact same way here. But instead of when you're tagging the columns for, you know, the the actual amount, you'd be selecting forecast slash budgets. So that means, you're telling PlanGuru that these number numbers are budgeted numbers, so put it in the budget dataset as opposed to the actual dataset. Sorry. I let me go back in there. I didn't mean to do that. Yeah. So discrete months do the discrete months again. Yeah. And you'll see it immediately when this pops up. Right? So you're checking the boxes, but you're also making a selection right here. The default selection is actual. Okay. That's probably what you're gonna be doing most often. But if you wanna import a budget, you're just making that selection right there. Sorry that I gotta do this again. Try, try clicking December twenty five. Just click December twenty five. See how they're all Ah. Okay. So there we go. You click the first one, you click the last one, everything in between will be checked. But that only works if, you know, you have the Excel file set up like we do, where the all the the columns are contiguous. Like, if you have a separator column between the years, that's not gonna work great. Right? So now what we have on the left hand side is every it's not just the accounts. It's every cell in that column that has a value. So for example's sake, I did this so that you see we have headers, we have totals, and then we have my actual accounts. The the actual account has the account name and then a dash and then the location. So I click on the first account. I hold shift. I click on the last account. I highlight the three actual sales accounts leaving behind the header, leaving behind the total. I go over on my right hand side. I go to the income section. I click I I, sorry. Right click. That's just the left click. So left click and drag it over. Okay? Grab my next set of sales accounts. Left click. Drag it over. Okay. Let's keep going here. I'm grabbing just my sales accounts, not the total. Yeah. This this is the big difference between the QuickBooks import and the Excel import. Right? The QuickBooks import, all this mapping that Christian is doing right now is automated, based on the account types you've already established in QuickBooks. When you're importing from Excel, you do have to do the mapping your first time. But the good news is once we're done with the mapping here, PlanGuru remembers it. So the next import that you run, as long as the account descriptions are the same or if you're using account numbers and those are the same, PlanGuru is gonna recognize them. And you don't have to do this mapping every single time. It's just bringing in a new, you know, column worth of of numbers for a new month as an example. Okay. You don't necessarily have to do, you know, the entire chart of accounts either since we got about ten minutes left. Okay. But Let's Just not going as as I hoped. I've kind of screwed these up a little bit. The user error. Okay. Let me just grab a few expense accounts, and it doesn't really matter from here. Now the other the other unfortunate thing about the Excel import is we don't know what the subclass is. Okay? So for example, something like depreciation, something like accounts receivable. Where's my balance sheet? Okay? For the PlanGuru relevant, account types, you know, you can select these as part of the import process. However, you know, once you get into the model, you can always change this on your ad change category tool. So I'm just gonna click next. Again, same deal with the, the QuickBooks import. We have the ability to, map these things, move them around, adjust where they're placed. Let's do another poll question here. Which accounting systems are you using or your clients using? Okay. I'm going to close the poll in five four three two one. Okay. So now you can see that our import has completed. Dan, what are you know, obviously, when we go back through an import and we drag and drop. There is one there the forecast month? Well, no. No. Tag tag the columns if you wanna show how, like, how the the mapping is retained based on the ones you already just imported. You could just go through a regular import. But if you wanted to show something else Well, I was talking about the forecast. Like, how do you what do you mean? Go through a regular import? Yeah. Like, I was gonna say if you wanted to show how the ones that you've already imported are already mapped on the second import. You don't have to do those again. All the ones that you'd haven't mapped will will still be in the unmap section. Oh, oh, you're talking about on the mapping screen? So once you well, let me get to so once you've set up your model and you're now importing actual results, You're typically only going to be importing data for the current month until you've closed the books, until you get to the next you know, if you're sitting here in, if you're in April, you're importing the latest April numbers as frequently as you need to, but you're just importing April. Okay? So in that event, we make the forecast month selection. Okay? And we say, okay. Every time I send you this Excel file, the account type is gonna be in in the first column. The sorry. The account description is gonna be in the second column, but the actual results for the forecast month will always be in the third column of this Excel sheet. So then, again, whether you update the numbers daily or whether you update the numbers weekly or monthly, when you're importing new data, you're gonna come back through. You're gonna line it up. You're gonna select forecast month. And then once we go in that way, that's when we have that sort of that quick import option available to us. K? If you do that forecast month selection, you can then literally just click the the quick import to bring the data in. So yeah. And all your mapping is retained. You know, all all your locational mapping is retained. So What else, Dan? We got five minutes left. Was there anything you needed to tee up for next class? I mean, next class, we're gonna be covering you know, once the information's in here, right, the foundation of the chart of accounts and historical data, we then switch gears and, you know, start to do the fun part, you know, actually applying projection methods to those accounts that we brought in. So we're gonna be going over those standard projection Why don't you just Do give them enough of the taste of the standard projections so that they can do case study number one. Give a a five minute bang through. Every single one of these methods has a full video. So Dan is gonna give you a much abbreviated summary of the of the primary methods. But if you need to learn more, we'll talk about it next week or there's a video. Go ahead, Dan. Yeah. So by default, all of your accounts at first are set to manual entry. That's why you're seeing these yellow cells going across here. Anytime there's a yellow cell, it means you can manually plug into it. Right? If it's a white cell like this, it means it's doing some sort of calculation. It's not manual entry. Right? Like this total one right there. I can add another one right here. But you can adjust the projection method that's applied to each account by right clicking on the account, selecting edit, or double clicking on the account. Both options bring up the same window. And you can see this window that appear shows you what account you're in at the moment, and it shows you what projection method is selected at the moment. Right now, it's manual entry. Right? And not only do I have the yellow cells in the sheet behind this window, but you're gonna see this grid a lot with these different projection methods that shows you the historical data you've imported for that account as well as your future months, which again are also yellow. And I can, you know, right click, copy that to the right if I want it to be the same thing every month or something like rent expense. There's different ways to apply manual entry. So instead of monthly amounts in this grid, I can allocate an annual amount instead, or I plug in the full year number, my full year target in that full year column. Based on this selection, it'll spread across the months, whether that's evenly or based on how it was broken down last year, or you can really dial it in by setting account specific seasonality, which means you can plug in some percentages for those months. And I'll break it down that way. And really these first four, we're gonna be covering this link to assumptions and KPIs in in detail in the next session, and that's where you can create custom calculations based on, you know, the drivers specific to the business and the industry, and we'll walk through some examples. But these first four are what I like to consider the standard quick and easy projection methods. Perfect for the case study. So obviously, entry, applying historical trends or averages to the historical data that you've imported. So you can do, like, a monthly average, and you just tell it how many months you wanna go back. It does the calculation for you. Growth rate, you can apply growth rate percentage, you know, year over year. So if you plug in a ten percent in January there, that means it's gonna look at January of last year and apply a ten percent to give you January of this year's number. And then percent of other accounts is typically used for cost accounts or another variable expense, wanna make a percentage of revenue. So if I wanna link up my bike purchases, cost of sales accounts to, you know, these two revenue accounts. I'll right click on that account, edit. I'll choose percent of other accounts. I'll first make the selection on what I want this account to be a percentage of. Check both those boxes. Right? Now it's connected. And then I choose a percentage. Right? And if I'm not sure what to choose, I could take a look at what it's been in the past. It'll show me the historical relationship between those accounts that I've just linked up. Show me historical percentages, and I can go with something similar. So maybe I wanna go with like thirty percent or something. When I click updates, you can see that forty five thousand is now thirty percent of the one fifty. Right? Because I connected to both of these numbers. So stick with those. Stick with those in the case studies first four here. And, you know, when we start discussing, you know, identifying revenue accounts and breaking things down like payroll or capital expenditures on the balance sheet or specific collection terms. Right? Those more detailed type stuff, we're gonna, you know, walk through some examples to get you as accurate as possible with your budgeting and forecasting VR assumptions and KPIs option. Looks like we're up two o'clock. Final poll question, and we'll call do we have to do seven or eight? Just seven. Right? We're done. Seven. Yep. Yeah. You did seven. Okay. Sweet. Alright, guys. Well, that's two o'clock right in the nose. So, do we have any unanswered anything in the chat? Or Nah. No questions. Hope everything made sense. Wonderful. Alright, everybody. We will, see you next week. And in the meantime, you know how to get ahold of us. So we'll talk to you soon. Enjoy the rest of your day, guys. Bye.